Notification sound is crackling

[KampRotte]

More or less everytime a steam notification sound is incoming it has a crackling noise at the end of it. Sometimes it is also at the start of it, like ("crackle-bloing!-crackle")
Only steam notifications produce this noise. Tried lowering Hz, checking minimum cpu power state etc. Nothing helps.

halp

[KampRotte]

still getting it myself, i've just turned them off for now until steam hopefully one day fixes it

[./Cxl-A]

I also have this problem, from time to time crackling sound when a friend has connected, and sometimes even, when voice chatting the pitch gets very low, and my friends have the same voice as darth vader....

[MaestroMurc =⛟]

I just upgraded headsets from Logitech G933 to Sennheiser GSP670, read through all the comments in this thread and the problem still exists. Note that there were no problems with my G933 but the crackling is very much present on my GSP670, which works perfectly fine otherwise.

All steam notifications makes this noise, valve please fix.

[Roadkill]

After extensive testing, I've found a cause/solution. It seems Steam wants the raw audio device without resampling. When using ALSA direct on Linux with Pulseaudio disabled, all crackle & distortions of the notification sounds were eliminated.

By default, all operating systems resample audio. I'm unsure if you can disable it in Windows or Mac; but to disable all resampling because of Steam's issue seems both silly & disingenuous. You want resampling of the higher frequencies (i.e., 192kHz) to 48kHz to avoid distortions in the audible frequency range caused by ultrasonic frequency playback.

Changing the default sample rates to 44.1kHz or 48kHz change nothing. It seems Steam wants your soundcard raw.

[STAHP!]

Having the same Problem here, i dont know how long its been like this but its starting to annoy me. first steam notification sound is always crusty distorted and then its fine. just like FidQ said if there is no message for 10-30 minutes the next notification sound is weird again.

Intel i5-8600k
16gb ram 2666
Nvidia 1070TI
Xonar DGX (but i belive the problem also happens with onboard sound)

I also have this problem in discord sometimes when im voicechatting it randomly starts being distortet full of pops for 1-2 minutes and then its fine again for some time.

[STAHP!]

Asrock z370 pro4, cheap but it does its job lol

[KampRotte]

引用自 FidQ：

I got this same problem.

I've been doing some research into finding the source of the problem, because it is annoying the hell out of me.

I found out by turning of CEF (chrome embedded framework) with the following launch parameter "-no-browser", the problem goes away, sadly now the store system is not working.

Replaying the "Steam/friends/message.wav" in either VLC or Windows media player the problem does not appear either. So clearly there must be a problem in CEF that only happens on some system.

Even opening "file:///C:/steam/friends/message.wav" in Chrome does not suffer from this problem.

Another thing i found in my search, Discord seems to have the same problem from time to time. And it also runs with CEF, this seems more rare though and hard to reproduce.

In Discord i noticed that setting Output device to default seems to get rid of the problem. When selecting the device manually is making the same distortion as in steam.

I'm aware that Steam has no interaction with the Discord development, but i was just pointing out there might be a connection.

Using onboard sound on a Z390-F, USB headset seems to do the same.

I have no other problems in other programs.

Recording of the sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlp17Sa44S4

Edit: Same thing when using steam chat in Chrome, nothing in firefox.

Edit2: First message every 20 minutes seems to have this problem.

Interesting find ... i've noticed it happening from time to time with discord aswell.

and yes it's always the first message after couple minutes of silence that has this bug here too.

[Madderose]

Hi, I would like to add I have the same issue for some time now as well. Changing the audio sampling didn't help. I have a Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 gen 2 driving my "dumb" analogic headset, 192khz sampling and 256 in buffer size. No cracklings in games or other parts I could speak of. I disabled Discord notifications so I can't confirm yet the issue present there or not.
I run the last stable version of Windows 10.
Also, I'm well aware CPU may be an issue when your PC struggle to render sound, but I have a 3700x and a decent PC overall. (link to a recent quick & dirty bench : https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/26108148)

[Ryzen_Mike]

@Madderose yea highly doubt its ur cpu man. I got the same issue, I thought it was just me for the longest time. I know lately the realtek drivers have just been sucking. I download the drivers made for my MOBO from MSI and i get all this crackling and popping. I let windows pick and its fine. Eventually windows updates the drivers tho and occasionaly I get crap and right back to popping, crackling and other stuff. It's weird tho, it only happens at certain times

Like in game audio will be ok, or watching a movie, But in steam and if you grab the volume bar and raise it then let go of the mouse so it makes a sound then grab it again real fast and drop it low to make another sound and keep doin it fast ,you will hear static and pops in the background. If you do it once you cant tell or its really hard to. I usually do this when i install a new audio driver. Sometimes they do it , sometimes they dont.

Its funny tho cuz it sounds like the computer is low on resources and is struggling to play the audio. But theres plenty.

[El anclador]

I didn't have this issue before, but now I do. I've tried everything to fix the crackling sound, it's driving me nuts.

[Madderose]

引用自 forbidden soup：

I didn't have this issue before, but now I do. I've tried everything to fix the crackling sound, it's driving me nuts.

Welcome to the club.

[STAHP!]

i tried so many things and nothing worked so i just said ♥♥♥♥ it and got used to it. i dont even notice it anymore, sure it sucks that steam cant get their ♥♥♥♥ together but thats just how it is.

[oOMeowthOo]

I'm going to suggest a solution and give some insight regarding what might be causing this issue. I've posted this on Steam Reddit, but it got filtered by Reddit automod. This has nothing to do with your PC specs, because I don't have a crap PC, SSD, i5 8400, 16 GB RAM, unless this has something to do with CPU multi-threading.

First of all, I have already turned off the sound notification from the chat setting, so I'm not hearing any chat notification anymore, this was just a bandaid fix that I used for the past 2 years to deal with this. Second of all, this sound crackling problem also come with a sudden FPS stutter. Third, this sound crackling and FPS stutter problem occur from the following condition and scenario.

1) The chat box has to spawn out of nothing, that is when someone message you randomly and you don't have any chat box pre-opened. This problem does not exist when you have the chat box pre-opened.

2) The person that message you, has to contain chat history that involves a lot of embedded URL, image, media that auto preview what the content is going to be.

Now, the real cause of this chat notification sound crackling problem is exactly just that, the Steam client needs to load a chat box to your Steam overlay, all those auto embedded previewed item like Youtube links, Twitter links, Facebook page, etc. All at once, this means lag, and there you get a sudden FPS stutter and message notification sound crackling, extremely tilting when playing a serious competitive game.

And the fix is just simply turning off the auto embed feature like in the following picture.

https://i.imgur.com/uMoexiR.png

[STAHP!]

Alright im going to try this solution and see if it works. if i dont come back it worked :D

[KampRotte]

引用自 FidQ：

引用自 oOMeowthOo：

I'm going to suggest a solution and give some insight regarding what might be causing this issue. I've posted this on Steam Reddit, but it got filtered by Reddit automod. This has nothing to do with your PC specs, because I don't have a crap PC, SSD, i5 8400, 16 GB RAM, unless this has something to do with CPU multi-threading.

First of all, I have already turned off the sound notification from the chat setting, so I'm not hearing any chat notification anymore, this was just a bandaid fix that I used for the past 2 years to deal with this. Second of all, this sound crackling problem also come with a sudden FPS stutter. Third, this sound crackling and FPS stutter problem occur from the following condition and scenario.

1) The chat box has to spawn out of nothing, that is when someone message you randomly and you don't have any chat box pre-opened. This problem does not exist when you have the chat box pre-opened.

2) The person that message you, has to contain chat history that involves a lot of embedded URL, image, media that auto preview what the content is going to be.

Now, the real cause of this chat notification sound crackling problem is exactly just that, the Steam client needs to load a chat box to your Steam overlay, all those auto embedded previewed item like Youtube links, Twitter links, Facebook page, etc. All at once, this means lag, and there you get a sudden FPS stutter and message notification sound crackling, extremely tilting when playing a serious competitive game.

And the fix is just simply turning off the auto embed feature like in the following picture.

https://i.imgur.com/uMoexiR.png

Turning off the auto embed feature did not solve the problem for me.

I do not remember if i told this in a older post, but running steam.exe with "-no-browser" argument, turns off the chromium engine, the problem is gone, but it turn of the browser support in steam, so its not really a good solution.

Same here. Turning off the auto embed feature did nothing. But thnx for suggestion.
I am back to just having notifications turned off since steam team seems to not be be able to fix this after all this time.